Most failed systems were bought before anyone mapped how work actually happens. Here is the sequence we use to get adoption right.
Walk into any organisation that has 'digitised' and struggled, and you will usually find the same story: software was procured first, and the workflow questions came later. The system reflects how a vendor imagined the work, not how the work happens — so staff quietly route around it, and the spreadsheet economy returns within a year.
The fix is unglamorous. Before any procurement, map the three or four workflows that matter most: who originates information, who approves it, who needs it downstream, and where it currently gets stuck. In our experience this exercise changes the requirements list dramatically — and often shrinks it.
A smaller system that mirrors real workflows will outperform a larger one that fights them. Adoption is not a training problem to solve after launch; it is a design input from the first week. When the people doing the work recognise their own processes in the tool, training becomes confirmation rather than persuasion.
Our rule of thumb for clients across Africa: spend at least as long understanding the workflow as you spend evaluating vendors. The ratio of those two investments predicts adoption better than any feature checklist.
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